Government officials on Wednesday expectedly rejected all amendments to the 2022 budget revision proposed by opposition MPs. Pročitaj više

Among the rejected amendments that the state agency Hina chose to single out were the ones proposed by MP Miro Bulj and MP Nikola Grmoja of the conservative populist party Most, which called for electricity vouchers, and state-funded allowances for people in the earthquake-struck Banija region “still living in container homes.”

“Residents of Dalmatia are discriminated against and will have to pay for electricity more because they do not have gas supply infrastructure,” Bulj, who is also the mayor of the southern town of Sinj, said, asking for allocating 100 million kuna for electricity vouchers for households that consume more than 2500 kWh in six months.

Also rejected was MP Grmoja’s amendment asking that an allowance of 1,000 kuna be secured for each person in Banija still living in a container home. “The measure would apply to around 5,000 people,” Grmoja said, adding that the government “had not done anything over the past two years” and that the allowance was the minimum it owed to the people in Banija due to “its incompetence.”

“Government representatives also rejected amendments by MP Katarina Peovic of the Workers Front asking for an extra 100 million kuna for vulnerable groups of energy consumers, to be allocated depending on their income,” Hina said, without naming the “government representatives.”

“Around 600,000 pensioners live in poverty and energy vouchers should be given to almost each one of them,” she said.

The planned funding is sufficient, 150 million kuna is envisaged for that purpose under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan over a five-year period, a government representative said, rejecting also Peovic’s amendment asking for an additional 2 million kuna for preventing youth violence by taking that amount from the allocation for religious communities.

“One in five children in Croatia is a victim of some form of violence and one in three is a victim of online violence, the funding for prevention should be increased if one plans to seriously tackle that problem,” she said.

Amendments by the right-wing Homeland Movement party related to the population and demographic policy were not accepted either.

“A monthly allowance of 753 kuna for each child in Croatia would help their families decide to stay in their places of origin,” said Davor Dretar of the Homeland Movement, while Boska Ban-Vlahek of the SDP, dissatisfied with the fact that her amendments, related mostly to projects in Medjimurje, were rejected, said that the region of Medjimurje “always ends up forgotten.”

Opposition MPs had also put forward amendments to the budget revision asking for additional funding for various infrastructure projects and for the construction of schools and kindergartens, but they were all rejected.